Via The Register

“We could do a sample manual recount, but if it turned up a problem, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, which would be the quickest way to collapse voter confidence in the result,” Bennet told us.

This is an anathema to campaigners like Mercuri. “The law should always include some percentage of manual audit and there always must be a way that a problem with the check should trigger an investigation, possibly resulting in the discarding of the electronic totals.”

And she is not the only one who thinks the electronic count should be audited. Becky Hogge, executive director of the Open Rights Group, says that ORG is campaigning for the law to be changed to make a manual recount of a statistically significant sample to be mandatory in all electronically counted elections.

via OUT-LAW

The European Parliament has said that copyright-infringing music and film file-sharing should not be criminalised. The Parliament has said that file-sharers should not be prosecuted as criminal offenders unless they seek to profit from the sharing.

(Via guardian.co.uk Technology.)

“Ofcom warns UK’s major internet service providers it may be forced to impose a code of practice if they cannot thrash out a voluntary agreement”

(Via The Register) Chris Williams writes

The government has refused to investigate BT’s covert wiretapping of thousands of its customers in 2006 and 2007, despite its own expert’s view that without consent Phorm’s advertising targeting technology is a breach of criminal law.
…
BT customers who have attempted to report the secret listening and profiling experiments to the police have been told to approach the Home Office. One was subsequently told over email by an official: “It is important to remember that private companies such as ISPs are allowed to do certain things under section 3 of [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] that Law Enforcement Agencies cannot do without permission.” The Home Office advice to BT and Phorm meanwhile, written by civil servant Simon Watkin, says a proposed Phorm deployment may be legal under RIPA only if consent is obtained.

(Via OUT-LAW)

The privacy watchdog for EU institutions has called for a planned requirement for telecoms companies to publish details of information security breaches to be extended to banks, businesses and medical bodies

(via OUT-LAW)

The UK music industry has rejected the Government’s proposal to legalise the transfer of music from CDs to MP3 players without a levy. It has asked for a tax on devices like Apple iPods which it says should compensate artists for the transfer.

The Government has proposed legalising the format shifting of music to computers or MP3 players as long as the CD was paid for, the transfer happens just once and is for personal use only. Currently the practice, which is near ubiquitous amongst MP3 player owners, infringes copyright.

The Music Business Group (MBG) is an umbrella group of trade bodies representing music managers, songwriters, publishers and performers. It comprises organisations like BPI, AIM and MCPS-PRS. It has rejected plans contained in a consultation document issued by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) to allow the transfer without any extra charge being levied.

The latest edition of the Banking Code, the voluntary consumer-protection standard for UK banks, was released last week. The new code claims to “give customers the most up to date information on how to protect their accounts from fraud.” This sounds like a worthy cause, but closer inspection shows customers could be worse off than they were before.

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Clauses 12.5 and 12.9 include some debatable advice about anti-virus software and clicking on links in email (more on this in a later post). While malware and phishing emails are a serious fraud threat, it is unrealistic to suggest that home users’ computers can be adequately secured to defeat attacks.

Read more at LightBlueTouchpaper.org